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this allegiance to the Entertainment-Consumer
Complex itself came from—that is a much larger question. It would take us into politics and economics, becoming, in time,
a treatise in itself.)
    But what about me? Now I had to look at my own place in the culture of training and entertainment. Those course evaluations
made it clear enough. I was providing diversion. To some students I was offering an intellectualized midday variant of Letterman
and Leno. They got good times from my classes, and maybe a few negotiable skills, because that's what I was offering. But
what was I going to do about it? I had diagnosed the problem, all right, but as yet I had nothing approaching a plan for action.
    I'd like to say that I arrived at something like a breakthrough simply by delving into my own past. In my life I've had a
string of marvelous teachers, and thinking back on them was surely a help. But some minds—mine, at times, I confess—tend to
function best in opposition. So it was looking not just to the great and good whom I've known, but to something like an arch-antagonist,
that got me thinking in fresh ways about how to teach and why.
    The World According to Falwell
    I TEACH AT the University of Virginia, and not far from me, down Route 29 in Lynchburg—whence the practice of lynching, some
claim, gets its name—is the church of Jerry Falwell. Falwell teaches "the word of God," the literal, unarguable truth as it's
revealed to him in the Bible and as it must be understood by all heaven-bound Christians.
    For some time, I thought that we at the University of Virginia had nothing consequential to do with the Reverend Falwell.
Occasionally, I'd get a book through interlibrary loan from Falwell's Liberty University; sometimes the inside cover contained
a warning to the pious suggesting that though this volume might be the property of the Liberty University library, its contents,
insofar as they contradict the Bible (which means the Bible according to Falwell) were of no particular value.
    It's said that when a certain caliph was on the verge of burning the great library at Alexandria, scholars fell on their knees
in front of him and begged him to relent. "There are two kinds of books here," the caliph purportedly said. "There are those
that contradict the Koran—they are blasphemous. There are those that corroborate the Koran—they are superfluous." So: "Burn
the library." Given the possibilities for fundamentalist literary criticism that the caliph opened up, it's a good thing that
Liberty has a library at all.
    Thomas Jefferson, the University of Virginia's founder, was a deist, maybe something more scandalous than that, the orthodox
of Virginia used to whisper. The architecture of my university's central grounds, all designed by Jefferson, is emphatically
secular, based on Greek and Roman models. In fact, the Rotunda, once the university's library, is designed in homage to the
Roman Pantheon, a temple to the twelve chief pagan gods. Where the statues of those gods stand in the Pantheon, there, in
the Rotunda library, were books. Books were Jefferson's deities, invested with powers of transport and transformation equal
to anything the ancient gods possessed. As soon as they saw the new university, local divines went apoplectic. Where was the
church? Unlike Princeton and Harvard, the state university didn't have a Christian house of worship at its center. From pulpits
all over Virginia, ministers threatened the pagan enclave with ruin from above. In 1829, the Episcopal bishop William Meade
predicted the university's ruin, because, as he put it, the "Almighty is angry" about the Rotunda. (It's probably only fair
to report that in 1895 the Rotunda did burn down.)
    Jefferson—deist (maybe worse), scientist, cosmopolitan—seems to have believed that the best way to deal with religion was
to banish it, formally, from the university, and instead to teach the useful arts of medicine, commerce, law, and the rest.
The design of my